End users have more media and communications choices than ever before. A number of prominent technological trends are currently underway (e.g., more computing devices, more online video services, more Internet video traffic) that are changing the data delivery landscape. As the bandwidth potential of computer networks grows, the traffic transmitted across networks grows as well. The increase in traffic often causes network congestion: resulting in the dropping of packets and the backing off of transfer rates.
In order to ensure efficient use of network resources, the network should be monitored to provide information regarding network traffic flow. Due to the high amount of network traffic, it is not practical to perform an analysis of all data packets transferred over a network (e.g., in order to better understand the traffic flows). One way to monitor network traffic flow is to perform a statistical analysis on a sample of data packets. However, there can be multiple ports receiving various sized data packets of various sizes and/or at different speeds, where ensuring the proper amount of sampling of the variations of data packets can be difficult.